Magic
by Lady Altair
Summary: You're not young enough anymore to believe that all you need is love. A MuggleMagic marriage in the second person.
1. Chapter 1

_Magic_

* * *

You are twenty years old and he is an adventure. That's all you need to know, all that you _do _know. There are a hundred things you don't, a hundred missing pieces to the puzzle—where does he live, where does he work, what is his life outside of you? Because he shows up on your parents' doorstep and grins at you and as far as you know, he _has _no life outside you, he ceases to exist when he disappears—always on foot—around the bend in the road. You are twenty years old and unabashedly self-obsessed; you _like_ that illusion. No one's ever even pretended you were the center of their universe, and it's gorgeous to feel like you are.

When there are times between his appearances on your doorstep, you casually ask—"What have you been up to?" thrown into the conversation when he asks about your day at uni, or "Where did you disappear to?" when he hasn't come around for a week. He never quite answers, but you never quite notice.

You're too blinded to notice much, notice how he fumbles with the notes when he goes to pay, like he's on holiday and handling some foreign currency, notice how he never, ever rings you, notice how he glosses over the aspects of the shop he owns. It never occurs to you the way he stumbles in conversations sometimes—unfamiliarity with bits of information you thought hardwired into the brain at birth, like Star Wars and The Beatles and Shakespeare. He tells you he grew up quite isolated, and you run with that excuse and apply it liberally.

You're remarkably unobservant. Your mother told you that at eleven when you gave yourself a black eye walking into a closed door, your best friend told you that at fifteen when you failed to notice that she'd bleached her hair blonde. You tell him that on your second date when he asks if you like the shirt he's wearing—it's the one you approved on the day you met, when he asked for your opinion in Selfridge's. You wouldn't have known it from a rag, you tell him; "My dad uses the phrase 'terminally unobservant', usually following up with a speculation that my obituary is going to include the phrase 'giant hole' or 'unexpected flight of stairs.'"

He kisses you while the both of you are still laughing, and cheekily asked if you noticed _that. _You say no, you must've missed it. You can't even pretend to miss the second one.

You love him before you mean to, and say the words even before then. It's a rush, an exhilaration, an accident, but he seized on the words with such a gleeful fury you know he's been waiting for them. You only notice after the words are out of your mouth that they're true.

Your parents don't like him—they notice all the things you're blind to. "No car, no mobile," your father says after he watches you walk back in the house one day. "And what does he do?" your mother asks fretfully. You feel stupid when you can't answer, can't answer any of the sensible questions they're asking.

"He's nothing to build a life on," your father warns ominously out of the blue at dinner one random Tuesday.

Your mother is gentler about it. "We all have those boys, darling," she says while you're shopping for antiques one day. You look up from the jewelry displays to find her looking at you, sympathetic but determined. "But you don't marry them," she finishes. You'll remember the moment exactly for all its irony, you're holding a silly, expensive silver hair comb in your hand while she says it.

A few months later, you wear the comb as 'something old' when you stand by him in Gretna Green. Your parents are there, it's not quite a runaway wedding, but there's doubt and disappointment creasing lines around your mum's eyes and you don't like to look.

Her look haunts you as you sit down to the wedding dinner, saps away some of your conviction and you curse her a little for it. You look over at him as he grins brightly at your side and you really hope he's smarter than you, that he's given this a lot more thought.

Your parents sit across the table and are a little quieter than normal through the dinner; you haven't quite burned your bridges, nothing so dramatic as that, but you're chopping away at the support, day by day, splinter by splinter. They do not approve of this, not at all. They think you're young and stupid and impetuous, and their doubt is puddling under the table and wicking up through your white satin shoes.

You hope—because in a blood-freezing moment of terrible clarity you realize that you don't _know—_that he's worthy of all this trust you are putting in him.

Your wedding night isn't much fun at all, and you're still a virgin in your pristine wedding white, sitting on the unrumpled bed when the sun rises. It all makes a lot of sense, what he's told you, in some strange post-wedding reality where 'making sense' means 'making none whatsoever'. It all really sucks, too. You tell him so.

He looks sick, sitting next to you in his black suit with the waistcoat unbuttoned and the tie undone. You haven't spoken to him in two hours, since you finished screaming. Not fair, you think.

You tell him that, too.

"We could get it annulled," he whispers, not even daring to look at you. You crush one of his roses—one of the thin-air roses—in your hands and bat away the emerald and amethyst butterfly that's settling into your hair before you laugh, ugly and rough at that picture, marching down to some government office still in your wedding white. You could, you think. Fill out some papers—laugh crazily when they ask you why and _lie_—and chalk this all up to some extended flight of insanity.

You haven't scuttled your escape yet. You could go back, go home and repent and submit to some subtle 'I told you so' and move on like none of this happened, like he and everything he is never ever was.

You really don't want to, and it's very surprising. You don't _want _to cross those bridges behind you, it's not a matter of _can't. _You're walking blind on a path but—_fuck—_you love him more than you thought, and going back on this would be burning something else entirely.

It occurs to you that someone else—someone lovely, someone _easier—_could make you just as happy. But you love _this one_, sitting wretched and guilty and almost rejected next to you.

Well, fuck.

Somehow, walking back into the known seems scarier than stumbling blindly forward. At least you'll have a hand to hold, going this way.

You take it and a hesitant but painfully beautiful smile lights his face and you try to quell the queasy sensation in your stomach. There's just enough doubt and fear in the moment that you know, someday, you're going to look back and wonder or, worse, _know, _you fucked this decision up.

Sex isn't that great and you lay there, panicking, with your head on his chest as he sleeps.

He has a very nice cottage in the middle of nowhere. Literally—it's miles from the nearest road, a little cottage in the clearing in the woods, something out of a fairy tale. There are barely any paths leading to it, they're all rough, twisting and barely even noble enough to be called paths at all.

He promises to buy you a car that can handle the terrain. That's the nice thing to write home about—he owns a store in London. Not one your parents will ever, ever find, but the…_flying _broomsticks he sells make him a lot of money—well, the strange, heavy gold things he exchanges for money.

He has to warn you not to try to use the big gold coins or exchange them at any bank you can find. You get a little angry—well, _obviously, _you think as he explains all this with an infuriating glaze of primary-school-teacher condescension.

It's all a big secret and no one's allowed to know. You pretty much got that straight off, as if you'd run to anyone. Ha, yeah, because that all would roll so well. You envy them their ignorance, anyway. It's a fantastic, unbelievable world and you have no place in it. You feel it keenly, too, even in your own house.

You hate the fairytale cottage he carried you into.

You can't turn the lights on or off in your own house. You can—and do—scream _lumos _or _nox _until you're hoarse (but only when he's not at home, it's embarrassing.) The orb fixtures in the ceiling are completely indifferent to your voice. You can't cook in your own kitchen—all the appliances are controlled by something you can't control.

You wonder aloud one night while you help him make dinner if you might buy some new appliances—normal ones, ones you can _use. _You find out there isn't any electricity wired in the house. So much for that idea—he's a better cook anyway, you rationalize.

You decide not to ask about the plumbing.

Honestly, though, you're happier than you thought you'd be on that long June night when you found out your world was sort of a huge joke and that you were way more mundane and unimpressive than you thought. You wake up to his face and you always find him waiting for you, propped on one elbow and looking at you like you're the best thing in his inconceivable world.

He is something new every day, he is still that grand adventure. A bedroom full of flowers, glittering jewel-toned hummingbirds that settle in your hair, a ride on the fastest broomstick he owns (and he owns a lot, they're his obsession.) Some things are so wonderfully lovely that you almost don't resent it all.

And then you come home from work and have to sit in a dark house until he comes home to turn on the lights and make you dinner. Feeling like you don't belong in your own house is ugly and uncomfortable, like you don't belong when he's not there to smooth your way. Dependency rubs you the wrong way.

Driving to work in your Range Rover through the woods and into the nearest little town is like driving out of a fairy tale and into the real world. You leave your prince and your crown behind to work as a secretary for the local doctor.

People seem surprised to find you utterly normal after they find out your surname. The village busybody who works alongside you kindly informs you that you've married the mysterious eccentric in the strange house.

"Really," you reply, deadpan and dry, completely unimpressed in a way that obviously disappoints her. You grow to loathe your shared lunch hour—she can barely find the time to put food in her mouth, it's running too quickly, telling you increasingly disturbing (and increasingly fictitious) gossip about the man you married and his family, god rest their poor dead souls. It's more annoying than anything, and borders on amusing on the slower days at the office.

She has _no_ fucking idea, anyway.

You don't realize all the choices you had until they're in the bin with your unopened box of tampons and a positive pregnancy test.

He's _so _happy (and you are too, really) but this is a bridge burning if ever there was one. Once upon a time, before this baby, you could have walked away and left this world behind you and never looked back, ever. Not that you ever wanted to, but that option was always there.

You've tied yourself down now, though. You've tied a piece of yourself to his world, sculpted your own flesh and blood into something that's going to belong to it in a way you never will.

That thought scares you. Even now, when you _are _your baby's world, there's this other one waiting for it and you're already anticipating the loss. That fear spoils a little of your happiness as he whirls you around the kitchen to some unfamiliar music on an old-fashioned radio that doesn't pick up any radio waves you've ever listened to.

The sex is better. A lot better. You fall asleep without that nagging, latent panic sticking in the back of your mind.

Being pregnant is nice, you think. The morning sickness passes quick and you breeze through the rest of the unpleasantries like they're nothing. He is lovely, too, holding your hair back while you're being sick, learning to drive the car so he can take over when you get too big (he's actually not too bad), pressing his cheek to your slowly thickening stomach and talking to the baby, acting all sweet and treating you like you're delicate porcelain.

Six months into the pregnancy, you're sitting reading a book while the sun sets and the room falls dark. When it's too dark to see anymore, you look up from the words and curse, already trying to remember where you left your battery-powered torch. "Fucking _lumos,"_ you sigh, already hefting yourself out of the chair--you nearly fall over from shock when the lights flare on.

You whisper '_nox.'_ It doesn't work the first few times, but then the lights gutter and extinguish. He comes home to find you flipping the lights gleefully on and off--it works about one time in five, and the lights aren't always terribly bright, but it _works_. You jump on his back and scream the words a few times for good measure. The lights flicker very obediently and you kiss his cheek. He seems decently impressed, but there's a sad guard over his face as he carefully and gently explains the phenomena of 'normal' pregnant women 'borrowing' from their unborn babies.

It's nothing to do with you. You're utterly ordinary, embedded in the fringe of a world that is anything but.

You whisper '_nox_' and the room goes dark. There's a long silence. "Fuck this house!" you cry, all of the brilliance and excitement ripped away into sick, strange disappointment, mourning a dream you never even really dared to entertain. "Fuck this house, fuck my life, fuck _you!" _you shriek in a fury of resentment and hormones and the stark and painful certainty that you are never ever going to belong.

You get in the car he bought for you and drive, the tyres of the Range Rover bumping over the rough path towards town, towards the nearest motorway. You nearly smash the car into a tree when he pops in the passenger seat on your left. "Fuck!" you scream again; you're wearing the word out today. You burst into new tears, slamming your palms against the steering wheel. You end up with your head in his lap in the backseat of the car in the middle of the woods, crying incoherently between gasps of breath while he strokes your hair soothingly, his spare hand gentle on your stomach.

Three days later, you're moving into the big house in Hale he bought for you and the baby. The lights are electric and you can cook in your own kitchen and park your car in the drive and walk to Tesco and order in pizza and go to The Unicorn for dinner with your ordinary friends, invite them back to your ordinary house for chocolate gateaux. It's less painful to be ordinary when you're in a beautiful ordinary house and not some fairytale cottage in a clearing in the woods.

You don't want a thing to do with any of the strange midwife sort of people he brings into your house, making a huge sooty mess of your clean pretty parlor in the process. You much prefer to walk down to a normal doctor with the clean, familiar disinfectant smell, all the sense and science the world has to back up medicine. It's really not to hurt him--he seems to think it is, he seems unhappy when you tell him a little more snappily than necessary that, really, who _knows_ how effective their...well, you hesitate to call it _medicine, _but whatever they do that passes for it--how effective it is on _ordinary _people. But he never says a word and patiently sits with you in every waiting room, holds your hand and gets excited over the ultrasounds.

He apologizes for the first house as the two of you try (and fail) to assemble the cot in the nursery--he reaches for his stupid stick when something falls apart, and you're sure it's only the way you get stiff and uncomfortable when he uses it that freezes his hand. "That wasn't fair of me to bring you there--I can learn to do things this way, I can learn to belong here," he says, so earnestly that you try to smile through the sick sinking feeling that the words unsaid leave you with.

He says he can belong here, and he's apologizing because you both know you can't belong there. You _can't _do things his way, you can't learn to walk in his world.

You watch him carefully over Tab A and Slot B and the million tiny metal screws that litter the floor around you, the sick feeling fading away as you study the frustrated furror in his brow, leaving behind an affectionate smile at the beautifully reaffirming love that floods you.

"All of this Tab A into Slot B nonsense may actually be putting me off sex!" he explodes, tossing a piece of the puzzle onto the floor, carefully aimed away from you're sitting across from him.

You wonder, laying in bed idly and vainly trying to see your own toes over your stomach after a session of making sure poorly written directions haven't put your husband off sex forever. You wonder if he ever doubts like you do, if his mental picture of you is sometimes filed under "Oh, _God,_ what have I done?"

You're grateful you don't know, grateful you got lucky, because he is endlessly generous and patient and it's the first time in your life you know what it is to be first for someone.

You are a little more than twenty now, and he is a little more than an adventure.


	2. Chapter 2

_Magic_

* * *

You are thirty years old and he is an entirely different sort of adventure.

It's dealing with bathtime screaming and negotiating bedtimes and mediating pulled hair and tattletales. You can't dance to his wireless anymore, not without tripping on toys and, if you're unlucky, maybe a kid hitching around the carpet. He's the one climbing the Mt. Everest that is child-raising beside you, dragging the two older kids through the pitfalls of childhood while you haul the youngest around as she screams in your ear.

You love your babies, the nasty little brats. Even when they're kicking and squalling and giving each other lemur tails, you make yourself breathe, look hard in their small faces and find little pieces of yourself, little pieces of him, little pieces that are a perfect blend of the two of you. It instills just enough motherly awe to cut you off of dreams of throttling the little monsters.

You love your life, too, your lovely little existence in your lovely little house, pretending your lovely little family are as normal as you are. They're really, really not. Maybe you love pretending a little bit too much—the reality is much less cozy.

You find it hard to praise the things they do like he does; it just seems destructive to you, some defensive reflex that invariably makes a mess you can't clean up. Kids are bad enough when they're just the ordinary sort like you were. The ones you're raising are anything but. You colored on walls and broke vases and used your mother's Chanel makeup on your dolls. Your tantrums ended rather unremarkably, with nothing more than a few tear tracks and maybe a few bruises on your mum's legs where you kicked at her—you were a rotten, spoilt little kid. Squabbles in your new life usually end in something more colorful than tears and you are usually powerless to do anything about it. Your eight-year-old son has to walk around with no fingers all day after his younger sister objected to him pulling her pigtail, until your husband comes back from work to take him to their hospital to get it put right.

He talks about moving back to that house in the woods, out of your beautiful home in Hale. You simply assure him that you will be remaining behind, whatever his decision—under no circumstances will you be returning to that fairytale in the woods, to be the useless damsel in the tower. There are times for compromise in marriage—this is something you will never ever concede; this house, this normal house in this normal town is your fortress, your anchor, the only thing that keeps you from losing it entirely sometimes. It's the proxy, the stand-in for the normality you'll never have again.

You know perfectly well you don't quite belong in your pretty normal house, you don't quite belong _anywhere_, really; you're not talented like your husband and children, you're not blissfully ignorant like everyone else. You half pulled yourself out of your world because you love him and he needed you to. You won't pull yourself any further—you like this world where you can be competent and worthwhile. You don't have a place in his world—at least not any one worth having—and you are made to feel it at every turn.

He argues with you—he loves that house in the woods, it's been in his family for generations and the thought of it sitting empty grinds on some edge in his mind. "It would be better for the children," he pushes you one night after you've eased the door closed on your newest sleeping daughter. "They don't belong here, it's getting harder to hide some of their accidents. And they're telling stories, you need to pull them out of that school."

You would be enraged if you weren't exhausted. "They _can _belong here," you correct him. "And you can fix the accidents…as for the school, the teachers just think they have overdeveloped imaginations."

He doesn't like that you send them to the school a few streets over. Maybe you read a little more into it than you should, but it bothers you. Why shouldn't they learn the normal things you did? It's not _beneath_ them! They might be capable of things their classmates aren't, but your three certainly aren't above learning a little writing and arithmetic and interaction with the world at large. They aren't above learning multiplication tables or scientific laws or English literature.

"I don't want to go to that stupid school," your son agrees over breakfast one morning. "It's boring. The kids are stupid." You have to scold him over his Cheerios while his younger sister colors obliviously next to him. He glares at you, the dirtiest look imaginable. "You would say that, mum, you're stupid just like they are!" He shoves his cereal bowl away so violently that it spills all over his sister's drawing and she starts crying.

He probably doesn't mean it like that, is too young to understand the situation enough to realize the raw nerve he's just poured acid on. But there's such contempt and nine-year-old fury in his voice that it's all you can do not to cry yourself, instead rushing over to comfort your crying little girl and do your best to salvage her drawings from the spilled milk.

"Is daddy home?" she asks through her tears. "He can fix it." You freeze a little colder at the words and force yourself shake your head and say 'sorry, sweetie.'

When you put the baby down for a nap, you hide in the crevice between your bed and the wall and muffle your tears into the pillow so the kids don't hear.

You love them, and they love you, but already that world is pulling them away from you. It's a painful, frightening thing to recognize.

They have a choice, a choice between worlds, and even now you know better than to hope you have any chance of winning. You and your world are bland and colorless next to what they can have. It really isn't any sort of choice at all.

You still cry cry _cry_ when your eldest gets on that train and leaves you behind, clutching to the two children you have left and knowing you won't get to keep them for long. He comes home at Christmas to share eager tales with his father, who has a hundred stories of his own to share, a beautiful web of a life you never knew he had. You smile along encouragement when he relates excitedly all the wonders of his grand new school, but you feel bad at how insincere you feel inside. You somehow wish he would hate it like he hated school before, sometimes you wish that you could get on the train with him with a stick and black pot of your own and sit in class with a hundred eleven-year-olds and belong in the fairy tale that's your life….really _belong _and not just _inhabit_. You _envy_ your eleven year old son, and think you must be an awful mother to do that.

He stops creeping into your room during thunderstorms and curling up on your side of the bed. You're very afraid he's never going to need you again.

Your middle daughter still needs you, wants you to braid her hair every morning, cut her sandwiches just right, hold her hand when you're doing the shopping.

But she leaves, too, turns eleven and follows her brother aboard the scarlet train you'll never ride.

But your baby, your youngest, your last little daughter…she doesn't grow away from you like her siblings. She doesn't summon biscuits from the high shelves, doesn't turn invisible when she doesn't want to be found, doesn't color the cat green. You don't notice until the other two are gone, until the accidents stop.

She gouges long marks out your beautiful wooden dining table with a butter knife, cuts chunks of her silky blonde hair with stolen shears and tells you it's the Barbie's hair when you ask, steals your Shiseido makeup and makes herself up like a tart.

No letter arrives for her. You feel guilty for how pleased you are and grow even more certain that you are a terrible mother for not wanting the best for her. _But she can have the best, _you hold stubbornly, proudly congratulating her on her top marks in all her classes, the glowing praises her teachers lavish on her. She's beautiful and intelligent and there's not a thing wrong with her just because she happens to belong in your world and not his.

You love her more for it. It's not a fair thing at all, this favoritism, even as quiet and understated as you keep yours. But you need to make up for her father's disappointment, because he is not so subtle. He _cries _the night when the train leaves without her on it, when she comes home with the two of you, a little subdued and a little disappointed.You get angry with him, start a fight over his tears after she's gone to bed. "How dare you!" you hiss at him, sneering at his red-rimmed eyes. "Quit acting like this is such a tragedy, she's disappointed enough!"

"She's missing out," he argues back. "She's…" He can't find the words, because there are no gentle, subtle words he can say to you. You say what he won't.

"She's going to be like me, God help us all! She's going to be like me, she's not going to be good enough for your stupid world!" you shriek. "What a _fucking_ tragedy! Let's just give her some sleeping pills and a liter of vodka because, well, fuck, what kind of life does she have to look forward to!" You go painfully, ragingly silent and your fury pours off you, freezing the room.

"That's not what I said," he says tightly after a long minute.

"Oh, _please_, it's what you couldn't say," you toss out disparagingly.

You sit down hard on the bed, fury curling your back into a 'C'. You really don't want to look at him, you're so angry. It's not anything you didn't know before. You are unworthy and out of place in his world. You've known that since your wedding night nightmare. You are, to him, fundamentally lacking and now you've passed your insufficiency down to his daughter. If he never resented you before, you are afraid he will now. It infuriates more than it injures (but it really does both).

He sits down beside you, his hand reaching for yours. You restrain yourself from yanking it away, running from the room, grabbing your daughter and packing her up into the car, driving to the Manchester Airport and flying somewhere (you hope) he'll never find you, somewhere his world doesn't have to be reality bright in your face.

You are blind and your eyes are burning from the furious, beautiful light of all the things you can't see. You've felt like that, to some degree, for the past sixteen years of your life. And you don't want that for your daughter. At the same time you rejoice in this child who is like you, you mourn, too; she will spend her life like you will spend yours. Forever on the fringe, forced to witness wonders and worlds that will never be hers.

You start crying. For the mess you've made of your life, of _hers, _of the sick unfairness of the God and the genetics that have exiled her here in this lamentable freeze between worlds with you. At least you _chose_…she has no such luxury. And you cry for her. For everything she'll never have, never be, all the _nevers_ a mirror of your once-reconciled shortcomings. Everything you lack seems so much more tragic in her.

_This _is the moment you knew would come, the moment when you knew you would regret what you did when you were young and stupid and in love, caring not a whit for all the consequences that had to come.

You are afraid you traded love in the short term for pain in the long, and it's not all yours to sacrifice. You've failed her too, cheated her with a glimpse of something that is just as out of reach for her as it has always been for you.

You would take the other path, now. Just to spare her your life to lead. You would sacrifice every minute, every long hour and day and week of happiness in your sixteen years of 'yes', you would give it all up so she would never have to know a life of inadequacy. You imagine some other father for her, some other man who could praise her mind and talent and not wish for something else, wish she _was_ someone else, someone who could look at her and see something other than failure and inadequacy. You imagine some other life, something clean and easy that you could have had.

It doesn't work that way, you know, you would not have _her_, have _them _without _him._

And why do you still…how _can _you still love him like you do? It's such a costly love, and still you pay. Your parents were right to think you stupid. You really, _really _are. Because his arms wrap around you as you sob and he makes you feel better, somehow, a single plaster on slit wrists. He still has that power and you resent him, but not nearly as much as you resent yourself.

The three of you take a two week vacation to Disney World while the other two are away at school, like some big guilt-ridden apology for the more important things you can't give her. She has the time of her life in the bright Floridian sunshine and the older two complain and you feel a fraction better that she can have something they envy.

Somehow, now, it's you and her, him and them. Your family is divided, and you think it's probably your fault. It all seems like your fault, most days.

You have a pregnancy scare and he is _thrilled. _You want to throw yourself down the stairs when the test comes out positive. It's just a false alarm, though, and after you find that out, you and your doctor make sure that you can't ever get pregnant again. You can't deal with another child, another child to lose to his world or another child to disappoint him. You don't tell, let him think it's just not meant to be. In the end, it really isn't, anyway, he just doesn't need to know the details.

The anti-depressants your doctor puts you on after you burst into tears when he innocently and politely asks after your family and tell him a censored version of your life (your 'musically gifted' husband dotes on your two 'musically gifted' children and can barely hide his disappointment in the youngest girl you've passed your 'tone-deafness' on to) help a little. You don't even identify with 'depressed' until the medication pulls you out of the pit you never even realized you'd sunk into. Depression is something that happened to normal people, and you aren't one of those.

You start sharing a bed with him again after the medication kicks in. It sort of kills you wanting sex, but you have it anyway just to feel close to him.

You're almost forty and he's still an adventure. You're just getting tired.


End file.
